stimulant

A comment from Chris Bisignani’s blog:

How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that some of us want to Care about more than one thing? For instance, I’m extremely ambivalent about veganism. In general, I’m struggling with how to reason about individual action of precisely the type you criticize. I don’t think the way for the concerns associated with veganism to be championed is by an ad campaign aimed at creating more vegans. The long term solutions will involve decentralizing food production, making it easy to be vegan, pairing animal rights to human rights, etc. Systemic concerns. But, I don’t care enough to devote my time to those things. On the other hand, it’s easy for me to make the incidental decision to be vegan. Incidental decisions are what’s really behind _c_aring. Caring (that is, Caring) requires Devotion, and I only have enough time to Care for a couple things, if that. Initially, I thought my confusion about this was due to problems reasoning about low probabilities. I’m increasingly suspicious that these are false issues raised by the difference between conceptual and functional consistency. When we talk about consistency, we fail to differentiate (worse, there’s a very blurry line separating the two, with a width as large as your difficulty estimating the impact of decisions involving small numbers in big systems — i.e. low probabilities). Being vegan is conceptually consistent but functionally irrelevant. Comparing the cost of veganism to the probability of benefit is impossible — I cannot make predictions about most of the incidental decisions I make motivated by a desire for conceptual consistency (e.g. I don’t want to be party to cruelty to animals; I want to live sustainably, in the environmental sense; etc.). To muddy the waters even more, I’m not willing to rule out incidental decision making as valueless. In many cases, a data dearth is the issue. This is the problem ThoughtAndMemory.org is trying to solve: they want you to be able to get information about a corporation’s behavior along several dimensions (think environmental, political) at the point of purchase by taking a picture of a UPC with your cell phone. Informed decision complicates these issues. Any suggestions?